Advance to the Rear

The blazing-fast but short existence of rear-engine Sprint cars

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

The rules laid down by the United States Auto Club were pretty simple: A Sprint car, supposedly that most basic and understandable variety of vicious short-track race car, had to have an engine and four wheels. Nobody said explicitly where they had to be located.
That vagary gave rise to the brief, comet-like arc of a car that very nearly made obsolete the traditionalist Sprint car in one wild season of racing. It was a special breed of pavement-only Sprint car with its 305-cu.in., fuel-injected small-block V-8 positioned behind the driver, and the driver sitting far lower than in any normal, upright Sprint car. History indicates they were a response to USAC Sprint series chief Russ Clendenen's approval of a 40-race championship slate for 1973, the biggest in recent memory, which some owners reckoned would justify an extremely trick car for the pavement tracks. In 1973, USAC was the pinnacle of Sprint car racing. There were no World of Outlaws or All-Star tours yet.
Controversy began to boil right from the 1973 season opener on the blacktop banks at Salem, Indiana. Lee Kunzman won in an upright, but Greg Weld was second in a rear-engine car built by master fabricator Paul Leffler. The first real shock came when unheralded Dave Roahing won in a rear-engine car at Tri-County Speedway outside Cincinnati in only his second Sprint start. Next, a rookie named Tom Sneva, out of the very wild Western circuit for Supermodifieds, ripped off three straight rear-powered wins, on his way to a total of five. He was driving for Carl Gelhausen, who'd built a car to mimic the Supers that Sneva had already been racing.
"Carl Gelhausen just shortened and modified an old Indy car that he owned, because I have photos of it as an Indy car," said John Mahoney, an inductee in the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa, for his decades of racing photojournalism. John photographed the entire 1973 season, noting that, "There were others, but Gelhausen and Sneva were by far the most successful, and as I remember he didn't even start running it until mid-season. It was Sneva's success that probably started to drive a stake in them. Traditional Sprint fans, and that includes me, started saying, 'Wait a minute, this isn't fair.'"
They weren't alone. The 1973 USAC Sprint season was marked by a tremendous season-long battle between Kunzman and Rollie Beale, the latter of whom ended up winning the championship. Both Kunzman and Beale raced old-style upright Sprints on both dirt and pavement. Despite his win tear, Sneva, who only ran pavement, didn't even finish in the points running. It didn't matter. Gelhausen's car unquestionably punched Sneva's ticket to Indy stardom. He was an Indianapolis 500 rookie in 1974, nearly flipped out of the speedway the following year, broke the 200 MPH barrier in 1977, won the pole three times and the race once, in 1983. But old-school Sprint car owners like Mauri Amerling, Willie Davis and Steve Stapp were irked by the interlopers and their new cars. When the 1974 season started, they had been outlawed.
Some naysayers have claimed that booting the cut-down Indy cars also limited Sprint drivers' opportunities to hone their skills and transition to real Indianapolis cars. Not everyone buys the argument. As John said, "I wasn't unhappy at all when USAC banned them. I was satisfied when they went back to the traditional Sprinter."

This article originally appeared in the December, 2012 issue of Hemmings Motor News.